People have a trust gap between them and you, between them and a trades business, and I’ll explain that.

What’s a trust gap?

A trust gap is a gap between them being happy enough to make contact with you and their fear that you might be a bit shit. People have these preconceptions about tradies and they might be true about your business and they might be not (I hope they’re not).

They might think that you might rip them off or overcharge them.

They might think that you might not turn up when you said you were going to or you’re going to be late and leave them hanging around. (That’s a common theme isn’t it?)

They might think you’ll do a shit job or do a dodgy job or cut corners.

They might think that you will leave a mess, especially if you’re an electrician.

And you know all these things are common fears. They might think you might sniff their knickers in their knicker drawers or look at their tits, that’s a common thing too.

So some of these fears are real and understandable and some of these are put out there by the bad members of your profession, but people are afraid of them, whether they’re fair or not and your marketing needs to bridge that trust gap.

And you can do it with what you say on your website, and in particular something you can do it with is a guarantee.

Now, I have to confess, I went to a seminar yesterday by a chap called Paul Dunn.

He told a story about a trades business (I think in the States) who gives a guarantee:

We’ll pay you five dollars for every minute we’re late from the time we said we’d be there.

We’ll leave it tidy when we go where you don’t pay for the work at all.

Our guys will be polite and courteous or it’s free and you don’t pay.

We give a workmanship guarantee on the work we do.

They also said they’d be drug and alcohol free and they stopped short of saying we weren’t showing you any bum crack but this is how that business fixed all those fears. They actually fixed each one with an individual guarantee.

So you can imagine if you’re the punter and you’re reading their website, you’re going to go, “Alright, I’ll ring these guys. They must be good.”

What does that person have now? They’ve got some certainty that you’re not going to do those things.

You’ve put your money where your mouth is and I know you’ve accepted some risk by doing that because your guys might be late and they might swear, and they might smell of smoke, or they might forget to tidy up properly or you might be left at the mercy of some idiot who said it wasn’t tidy when it was.

But you can mitigate for all those things. You can take photographs of jobs, all that kind of stuff and most people will withdraw fine.

So what I want you to gain in terms of having more people call far outweighs what you risk in terms of some idiot taking the piss.

Because you should be and if you want help to do this obviously, to think about what guarantees are right for your business, because these are right for a domestic service trade. They’re not right for every trade.

So if you want help to think through what guarantees might be appropriate for you and what risks you can accept obviously, get in touch, there’s a button, press for a chat with Jon or if you’re on the website or leave your number in the comments and I’ll give you a call.

And by the way I have a guarantee in my business with business coaching for trades:

If after 30 days you don’t like it and you don’t think it’s for you and we don’t think it will work in your particular circumstances, I’ll give you your money back.

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About the Author

Jon Dale

Jon likes helping business owners and especially owners of trades businesses. Life can be a bit frustrating when you run a business and a trade business can be even more so. Jon reckons this stuff is fixable and that you can fix it by making some fairly simple changes to the way you do things. In fact, he runs a free monthly webinar to help explain the process further of moving your business from manual to scalable.